Monday, 16 January 2017

Good, Cheap or Fast....What's Your Marketing Strategy?

Good, Cheap or Fast....What's Your Marketing Strategy?

I saw this sign a few weeks ago and chuckled at the simple message
it was getting over. We all want everything to be the highest quality, as cheap
as possible and of course we want it now. However, in the real world there will
always be a compromise especially in the online world we all live in now.

Good & Cheap almost certainly won’t be Fast. We all have
budgets to work to and everything is delivered just in time. It is possible to
produce high quality work that’s good value for money, but the process will not
be fast. Look at the budget airlines, they all offer a good service (even Ryanair)
that’s cheap, but you need to book weeks or months in advance to get your cheap
flight. If you want to book it at the last minute (fast) it’s going to be a lot
more expensive to get a flight.

Fast & Good won’t be cheap. Sometimes we don’t want this
sort of service to be cheap. We are buying a great service and we want that
service fast. Think of a Michelin starred restaurant. You want a great meal and
you don’t want to be waiting hours for the food to arrive. To do this the
restaurant needs to employ a small army of chefs and servers. They also use the
finest ingredients, so it will not be cheap and we wouldn’t expect it to be cheap,
would we?

Cheap and fast is unlikely to be Good, something that is
rushed within a tight budget is invariably going to be poor quality. Think of a
service like Vistaprint. They are very cheap and deliver very quickly, but their
quality is patchy at best, using cheap materials to keep the cost down as
clients of mine have found out to their cost in the past.

There are some businesses that come quite close to providing
all three services, (think McDonalds, but is their food really really good?) but
usually there is always some compromise on one of the three.

In business, it’s fundamental to your marketing strategy to
decide what market you want to be in and keep to it. It is impossible to be
Good, Cheap & Fast all at the same time. It’s no use marketing yourself as
a high quality, highly responsive business if you are cutting your prices every
week.

Similarly, is not going to help you if you flit between Fast
& Good one week to Cheap & Fast the next. Clearly set your strategy out
and work with similar people in your intended market to help you achieve this.
The sooner you do this the sooner you can start employing the right tactics to
grow your business.